***shameless self-promotion***
You can get my latest book for only $1 until mid-August. Check it out.
***shameless self-promotion***
I really like Ishiguro’s works, though I haven’t read them all (I haven’t got to his two earliest works, or his latest, Nocturnes). The Unconsoled is the most surreal of the four I have read, and also probably the most surreal book I’ve ever read.
With When We Were Orphans, I became convinced that narrator, famous 1930s detective Christopher Banks, was batshit crazy for his two beliefs: that his parents could possibly be still alive some thirty years after their kidnapping in Shanghai, and that by solving the case he would somehow save the world from imminent war. That everyone around him was of the same opinion made me think they were imaginary. I still think he was deluded in large part no matter how the story turned out in the end.
Take that feeling and magnifiy it for The Unconsoled, except now it’s not just the narrator but everyone who’s crazy. The narrator, accomplished pianist Ryder, shows up for his latest performance in an unnamed European city. But he also has a whole schedule of things to get done, as he gradually becomes aware. He’s there not only to give a performance but to somehow save the city from its cultural malaise, to help the people accept their new cultural leader in a drunk and washed-up composer.
Ryder is exposed over and over again to locals who are caught up in their own dramas, those very small but obsessively turned over matters that occupy us all when we become lost in our own heads. There’s the hotel porter whose goal is to raise the status of city porters through his professional behaviour of never putting suitcases down to rest. The hotel manager, convinced he can pinpoint the perfect room for every guest. His son, determined to give the performance that will save his parents’ marriage.
Ryder seems caught in a dream, one of those tense, anxiety-driven dreams where you know you have to do something or get somewhere but you don’t know what or where and people keep sidetracking you when you try to remember, or you get dragged off to an important function in your pyjamas, or people you haven’t seen for years appear to tell you off, or a door in a cafe leads into a forest which segues somewhere else and you just accept it because that’s what happens in dreams.
Accepting this structure takes the reader a long way into just relaxing and going with the story, in which the character relationship begin to miserably reflect Ryder’s relationships. It’s an incredibly sad book, but in the manner of dreams, it ends happily enough for Ryder, so he thinks. A challenging but rewarding book.
